UK: Violence Against Women and Girls

Baroness Burt of Solihull Excerpts

Thursday 29th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Burt of Solihull (LD)]

My Lords, I wonder whether we are not looking at this subject from the wrong end of telescope, because by the time the violence has occurred, in a sense, it is already too late: the damage has been done. So I want to share my theory of how this abuse starts.

Sometimes, it begins at school. I was shocked to read Ofsted’s review of sexual abuse in schools and colleges. Did noble Lords know that 88% of girls have been sent pictures or videos they did not want to see, and 80% have been pressured to provide sexual images of themselves? The first I knew about this practice was some years ago. As a local MP, I met the worried parents of a girl who had been bullied into posting a photo of her own genitals online. She was so traumatised and humiliated that she refused to return to school.

That leads me to why I am so passionate about Amendment 170 to the Online Safety Bill, on cyberflashing. I was really delighted at the amendments the Government recently made, broadening the scope of the current offences of revenge porn and the sharing deepfake pornographic images. However, we still do not have a consent-based cyberflashing offence, although we do have alterations extending the scope of Amendment 170 to include content that has been altered and appears to be a photograph or a film. A group of us will be trying to convince the Government that they need to go that bit further, because the constraints put on the Bill will not prevent much of the damage that unsolicited cyberflashing will do to the mental health and well-being of women and, importantly, girls.

Thinking further about schoolgirls and boys, images being frequently sent without permission will increase the sexualising of children, and images sent “for a laugh” may pressure girls to laugh off these images on the outside when they are cringing with humiliation inside. They are not mature enough to cope. This is the first stage in being groomed into a culture which is a million miles away from how they have been brought up. This is where it often starts, with boys socialised into believing that porn is realistic behaviour as to what girls think and want.

In a sense, these are first-world problems. At the other end of the spectrum are abused migrant women who are nevertheless too fearful to report abuse because they fear that doing so might get them deported. Fear of having information shared between police and immigration authorities is enabling perpetrators to use immigration status to retain, control and inflict further abuse. This is known as immigration abuse, and the ambiguity of where people stand, even between the services themselves, leaves perpetrators with the freedom to act with impunity, evade justice and potentially target others, undermining public safety.

The answer would be a proper firewall—a blanket ban on services such as police sharing data with the Home Office. We tried to introduce such a ban during consideration of the Domestic Abuse Bill, but more needs to be done. I have no time to go into it now, but I would like to put the Government on notice that, a bit like Arnold Schwarzenegger, “I’ll be back”, raising the issue of the firewall in amendments to the Victims and Prisoners Bill.